It is known that vehicles have active safety systems such as lane departure warning systems, forward and rearward collision warning systems, automatic braking systems or the like. These active safety systems—which help to identify and, if necessary, avoid safety events—respond to sensed situations within a vehicle's operating environment by having one or more of its guidance components (such as the steering wheel, brakes or the like) cooperate with a controller to automatically adjust the function of such guidance components through braking assist, traction control, anti-lock braking, vehicle stability control, pre-collision braking or the like. Unfortunately, all of these systems have predefined response settings which cannot be customized in the manner used in driver convenience systems such as seat position, mirror position, brake and accelerator pedal position, steering wheel position or the like.
It is also known that within the realm of autonomous vehicles, sensor-based data can be used to derive driver-specific driving patterns, which along with driver-input user identification data, can be used to provide some limited range of operational control of the vehicle. Such customized vehicular control is only within the confines of one or more so-called safe envelope driving patterns, some of which appear to be based on predetermined (i.e., default) settings that are applicable to all drivers. The safe envelope driving patterns may be one or more sets of adjustable parameters limiting how a vehicle should be operated, for example, by controlling features such as the speed of changing lanes and the pattern of passing by vehicles, or the like. These systems are unique to autonomous vehicle operation, and as such do not permit an individual driver to customize system response for a vehicle that remains under operational control of the individual driver.
The author of the present disclosure has determined that it is desirable to have active safety systems with response settings that can be adjusted by each individual driver so that such systems respond to a safety event associated with the operation of the vehicle in a way most suitable to the driver, yet still permit the driver a wide range of control over the vehicle during normal vehicle operation.